Tag Archives: book

Few days ago I have been contacted from Packt Publishing and we talked about a good traffic generated from this blog. “Ehi, are you saying that people is interested in my reviews?” has been my reply. 🙂

Because of this nice result, Packt Publishing send all of us a gift to share with all of you to thank you for the good feedback on fcorti.com. The special discount of 50% can be used (for free) on one or more of the books listed below. The promotion starts today and will be valid until the 30th of September.

Do you really know what Apache Hadoop is?
Are you sure to understand the meaning of “big data” in the real world scenario?
How big data storage issue and data warehouse issue meet Hadoop implementation?
Which are the main tools Apache Hadoop is based on?

If you completely don’t know (but you are interested in) or you want to have a clear and final picture of those topics (and probably much more) you should read this book. Read More →

Alfresco web scripts are fundamentals to develop a real enterprise solution for the Customers. For this reason, having a complete (and updated) guide on how to understand and properly develop them, is the core of the success of a project.

As you probably know (or you read it now for the first time) CMIS is an open standard that allows different ECMs to inter-operate over the Internet through the definition of a collection of services and a powerful query language (CMIS-QL), modeled along a subset of SQL.

The goal of this book is to share and explain all the basics of the CMIS, using a practical and technical approach that starts from the history (why the CMIS was born), going through the definition of the (several) services and the query language, and ending with a collection of examples describing how to use CMIS in practice.

Ok, CMIS is thought to make different ECMs interoperate, but the amount of different languages and examples described in this book is interesting and well done. Starting from Java (with Apache Chemistry libraries), Javascript + JQuery, Groovy and (bascis of) PHP. Yes, I’m agree with you if you are thinking that the CMIS libraries are more and more than this but the description (and explanation) of the CMIS services (and examples) is all you need to understand how to approach the development using all the different languages supported (.NET, Python, ecc.).

As you can read from the title, Martin Bergljung focuses his description on Alfresco. And this is true because all the examples are developed using an Alfresco repository as referred architecture. But inside the book you can find something more about Alfresco. Personally I have found very interesting the description of the Alfresco Surf together with CMIS standard. Probably this topic is less useful for the most part of the readers (and practical cases) but is an interesting example related to the basics of the Alfresco Share application. Quite interesting also the example on how to make Alfresco and Drupal interact, using CMIS.

Last but not least, I read the book very easily in the first part (the more descriptive) and in the last (full of practical examples in the different languages). I think I will use the book also as manual of the several CMIS services when I will develop something because I suggest you to remember that…

The book it’s the natural update and evolution of the famous “Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation”, published in June 2009 and today not so updated. And before, of the “Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation”, published in January 2007 by Packt Publishing.

You know, Alfresco features are growing very rapidly, month after month and release after release.

The fact that the book has more than 500 pages and it is written by 8 different authors (all of them are skilled IT professionists of Cignex Datamatics) clearly means that the content is relevant and detailed. Reading this book, infact, you will find that the content is not so narrative but oriented on practical topics and solutions.

The goal of the authors is relevant: explain Alfresco to IT specialists, starting from scratch and diving deep in the user experience, the customization, the development and the administration. Not bad in a single book!

The book is not specifically for developers (like the authors says) but for administrators, experienced users, developers, in particular for IT consultants.

I have found the description of the installation of the so called “Alfresco bundle” release together with the installation of all the Alfresco components, very useful because it’s not so easy to find, around in the web.

Very interesting, in my opinion, the description of the workflow using Activiti (JBPM is not described even if it supported by Alfresco 4) because it is concrete, developing practical examples for real life cases.

Last but not least, one final consideration about the explanation strategy: in my opinion too much descriptions are developed on Alfresco Explorer. We all know that Alfresco Explorer won’t be improved by Alfresco developers and Alfresco Share is the “modern” user interface. I think could be a good idea, for the next edition of the book, to move the most part of the examples (and images) to it.

In conclusion, I suggest this book to all the people that are not Alfresco Experts but would like to understand better what Alfresco is and how Alfresco works, with a good level of detail.

Talking with people, most of the time with technical skills, I often talk about the absence of a complete and updated book or guide about Alfresco ECM. Unfortunately I was not able to suggest one single read and most of the time we compare a huge collection of (old) books, sites, articles, tutorials, guides and blogs. The reason is clear: Alfresco has been improved in a lot of functionalities and very fastly during the last two years and this 4th version is the most complete, integrated and powerfull.

First of all I’m going to (buy and) read the brand new book but I’m confident that after this read I will tell that starting from today a unique and complete read is possibile, to understand Alfresco. 😉